Comments About Historians: Archives 6-19-03 to 9-30-03
Click here to return to top of page. Richard Pipes: The Reluctant Power Scholar (posted 9-30-03)
Arnold Beichman, writing in the Weekly Standard (Sept. 29, 2003): RICHARD PIPES is one of our most eminent historians. His books on Russian
and Soviet history have been among the most influential and (at least as far
as the academic left and Russian nationalists like Alexander Solzhenitsyn
are concerned) among the most controversial. But his new autobiography--"Vixi,"
Latin for "I lived" --is of interest not just for his academic work
but also for his service as a White House adviser. The book is also an informal
history of the last days of the Cold War, documented in dramatic fashion by
someone who was most assuredly not a belonger in official Washington. Pipes came to America in 1939 as a sixteen-year-old refugee from Poland.
A Warsaw-born predecessor in the White House, Zbigniew Brzezinski, was already
in Canada with his family when World War II broke out--and one wonders what
the Kremlin thought when two anti-Communist Poles became White House foreign-policy
advisers: Brzezinski as national-security adviser to a waffling Jimmy Carter,
and Pipes as a national-security desk officer to Ronald Reagan. Moving from
his longtime Harvard to Washington during the first two years of Reagan's
presidency, Pipes was able to apply his knowledge and sense of strategy to
the formulation of policies that helped bring down the Soviet Union. He had had some earlier experience with Washington as a member of the Committee
on the Present Danger and later as head of an official group that audited
the CIA's analyses of the Soviet economy--and found the CIA work to be woefully
inadequate. Unfortunately, this experience didn't prepare him for the kind
of stealth needed to win Washington's battles. Nevertheless, Pipes's appointment (thanks to Richard V. Allen, head of the
National Security Council and himself a leading anti-Soviet strategist) was
felicitous: a president who believed that the Soviet Union was not here to
stay, a national-security chief who shared that view, and a Polish-American
intellectual who agreed wholeheartedly. And they were all blessed with such
superb speechwriters as Tony Dolan and Peter Robinson, and their successors
who shared their clients' anti-Sovietism. That was why Reagan made his "evil
empire" and Westminster speeches, and why later in 1987, over the hysterical
objections of the State Department, he spoke at the Brandenburg Gate, with
the Berlin Wall behind him, to utter his dramatic apostrophe to the Soviet
Union: "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall." One thing is clear from "Vixi": Pipes simply didn't or wouldn't
understand the principles of a town where a bureau chief frequently has more
power than his cabinet-secretary superior. As Pipes, the Harvard professor,
describes it: "Such vanity as I possess was and remains that of an intellectual
who wants to influence the way people think and feel rather than one who enjoys
power over them or craves the status of a celebrity." But the only sure way to achieve that influence is through political power.
Henry Kissinger wrote a number of highly influential foreign-policy books
as a Harvard professor. His influence, however, only became measurable when
he went to work for President Nixon as national security adviser, a post from
which he made his great leap forward to become secretary of state. Pipes's complaint about mistreatment by Allen--who, he says, looked upon
Pipes "as a potential rival and hence kept me in the background"--is
unattractive. Far more significant is Pipes's assertion that Nancy Reagan
and Michael Deaver took a dim view of Allen "since they were determined
to tame Reagan's anti-communism and draw him closer to the mainstream,"
the mainstream being the anti-anti-communism which, I assume, they favored.
Mrs. Reagan, he says, "was troubled by her husband's reputation as a
primitive cold warrior." Anti-Communists like Allen and Pipes did not
fit into the Nancy Reagan-Deaver world. Deaver and James Baker, says Pipes,
"seemed to treat [Reagan] like a grandfather whom one humors but does
not take seriously."....
Click here to return to top of page. Edward Said's Legacy: A Negative View (posted 9-29-03)
Ibn Warraq ("a pseudonym used to protect himself and his family from Islamists") is the author of Why I am Not a Muslim; writing in the Wall Street Journal (Sept. 29, 2003): Late in life, Edward Said made a rare conciliatory gesture. In 1998, he accused
the Arab world of hypocrisy for defending a Holocaust denier on grounds of
free speech. After all, free speech "scarcely exists in our own societies."
The history of the modern Arab world was one of "political failures,"
"human rights abuses," "stunning military incompetences,"
"decreasing production, [and] the fact that alone of all modern peoples,
we have receded in democratic and technological and scientific development."
Those truths aside, Mr. Said, who died last week, will go down in history
for having practically invented the intellectual argument for Muslim rage.
"Orientalism," his bestselling manifesto, introduced the Arab world
to victimology. The most influential book of recent times for Arabs and Muslims,
"Orientalism" blamed Western history and scholarship for the ills
of the Muslim world: Were it not for imperialists, racists and Zionists, the
Arab world would be great once more. Islamic fundamentalism, too, calls the
West a Satan that oppresses Islam by its very existence. "Orientalism"
lifted that concept, and made it over into Western radical chic, giving vicious
anti-Americanism a high literary gloss. In "Terror and Liberalism," Paul Berman traces the absorption of
Marxist justifications of rage by Arab intellectuals and shows how it became
a powerful philosophical predicate for Islamist terrorism. Mr. Said was the
most influential exponent of this trend. He and his followers also had the
effect of cowing many liberal academics in the West into a politically correct
silence about Islamic fundamentalist violence two decades prior to 9/11. Mr.
Said's rock-star status among the left-wing literary elite put writers on
the Middle East and Islam in constant jeopardy of being labeled "Orientalist"
oppressors -- a potent form of intellectual censorship. "Orientalism" was a polemic that masqueraded as scholarship. Its
historical analysis was gradually debunked by scholars. It became clear that
Mr. Said, a literary critic, used poetic license, not empirical inquiry. Nevertheless
he would state his conclusions as facts, and they were taken as such by his
admirers. His technique was to lay charges of racism, imperialism, and Eurocentrism
on the whole of Western scholarship of the Arab world -- effectively, to claim
the moral high ground and then to paint all who might disagree with him as
collaborators with imperialism. Western writers employed "a Western style
for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient."
They conspired to suppress native voices that might give a truer account.
All European writings masked a "discourse of power." They had stereotyped
the "Other" as passive, weak, or barbarian. "[The Orientalist's]
Orient is not the Orient as it is, but the Orient as it has been Orientalized,"
he said.
Click here to return to top of page. How Gerhard Weinberg Discovered Hitler's Second Book (posted 9-25-03)
Daniel Johnson, writing in telegraph.co.uk (Sept. 25, 2003): In 1958, Gerhard Weinberg made the kind of discovery that features in every
historian's dreams. During his summer holidays, the young American scholar
had been examining captured German military documents in the US Army archives,
which - back then - were housed in a converted torpedo factory in Alexandria,
across the Potomac from Washington DC. Before being shipped back to Germany,
each one was being microfilmed. One day, leafing through the contents of a green box-file, he found a folder
labelled "Draft of Mein Kampf". Inside was a 324-page typescript:
"The moment I looked at it, read the opening lines and the attached document
on its confiscation, it became obvious to me that this was not a draft of
Mein Kampf. In fact, this was the book to which I had seen references,"
he says. It was a dramatic moment: Weinberg had unearthed a previously unknown second
book by Hitler, the only one he ever wrote after Mein Kampf. "This thing
in fact existed and was here! It really existed, it had survived," says
Weinberg, recalling his excitement. "Lots of stuff, after all, had been
destroyed - and now this could be made accessible to anybody who had an interest
in it." By a stroke of good fortune, it had already been declassified by the authorities,
which meant there was nothing to stop Weinberg making it public. Before there
could be any question of publication, however, he had to be sure that it was
authentic. Though this was a quarter of a century before the great "Hitler
Diaries" hoax - which damaged the reputations of the Times, the Sunday
Times and the late Lord Dacre - Weinberg was already aware of the danger of
forgery. The document itself, though yellowing, was in decent condition. Weinberg
applied the logical methods of Sherlock Holmes: "If you look carefully,
you can see that it has been dictated straight on to a typewriter, because,
periodically, there is a space and then a full stop or a comma. In other words,
the person who was typing thought there was another word coming and had already
hit the space bar, then realised it was the end of the sentence or there was
a comma coming. And I knew from other information that it was a practice of
Hitler's to dictate on to the typewriter. So the physical appearance of the
document was consistent with the way that Hitler actually operated." The provenance of the typescript was good: it had been found among other
documents known to be genuine. According to the brief report appended by the
American officer who confiscated it in 1945, this copy had been kept in the
safe of the Nazi publishing house and then handed over by Josef Berg, the
manager, who thought it had been written "more than 15 years ago"
(i.e. before 1930). The Munich Institute for Contemporary History, which had also been searching
for the Hitler book, told Weinberg that it had received correspondence about
it. Among the letters was one from a man called Lauer, who said that, during
the war, Berg had shown him the manuscript of a book by Hitler. "I checked up: who is Lauer and why would anybody show him secret things
out of the safe?" said Weinberg. "It turned out that this was a
man who had edited a whole bunch of songbooks for the Nazi party, so he knew
his way around the publishing house. So it made sense that Berg, a close friend
with whom he had worked there, might make himself important by saying: 'Hey
- you know what we got here?' " Berg, who was still alive, then provided a crucial detail. Writing to the
institute in 1958, he mentioned that there had been another copy of the typescript.
Weinberg seized on this: "At one point, after the first couple of hundred
pages of what we used to call ribbon [top] copy, it suddenly changed, and
the last 100 or so pages were clearly carbon copies. That suggests to me that
when they were collating it, back in 1928, somebody goofed. There were, at
one point, two copies - at least. "Now, this combination of information, and a careful reading of the
text, convinced me that there was no question but that this was authentic.
The bits and pieces of evidence fitted together and made sense. "All the corrections, with one exception, were made on the typewriter
while Hitler was dictating. He would suddenly stop and say: 'Strike that',
and Max Amann [the publisher to whom Hitler dictated the second volume of
Mein Kampf as well as this second book] would 'xxx' out a few words, and then
would come a new bunch of words. There is one short word corrected by ink.
My guess is that this was done at the time. There is no editing; it was never
worked over, even for spelling errors. It's the way it came out of the typewriter
in the summer of 1928. Then it was simply stashed away." Once the question of authenticity had been settled, Weinberg asked himself:
why did Hitler's second book never appear at the time he wrote it? "I
think Max [the publisher] advised him against publishing it just then,"
Weinberg says. It would have competed with Mein Kampf, the second volume of
which was not selling well. "The following year, Hitler aligned himself
with the very people he attacked in this manuscript: the people on the political
Right who wanted to undo the Versailles Treaty. Hitler thought they were utter
fools - but he was not about to say that in print, when they gave him money
to travel all over Germany and appeal to the German people. And, later on,
all kinds of other changes would have had to be made [to the book]." Did Hitler ever refer to the book again? "The one time when he did refer to it in his table talk was in February
1942, almost 14 years after he had written it. Obviously, in the intervening
years, his decision not to publish it must reflect some kind of choice."
Click here to return to top of page. Professor of Art History Honored by Smithsonian for book About Banned Homosexual Images (posted 9-25-03)
Steve Houchin, writing in the student newspaper of the Universty of Southern California (Sept. 24, 2003): The Smithsonian American Art Museum has recognized a USC professor of art
history for his book on censorship and homosexuality. Richard Meyer, chair of the art history department and an associate professor
of modern and contemporary art, won the 2003 Charles C. Eldredge Prize for
Distinguished Scholarship in American Art for his book "Outlaw Representation:
Censorship and Homosexuality in TwentiethCentury American Art."
"Outlaw Representation" is a study of homosexual art from the years
1934 to 2000. It examines the censorship and public scrutiny experienced by
artists whose work was declared immoral and indecent. "In a way I wrote this book as a defiance of censorship," Meyer
said. "I wanted to say that these images are worth more attention and
have a lot to offer. They should be taken seriously." Works by artists such as Robert Mapplethorpe and Andy Warhol are examined
in order to point out specific controversies throughout history. The book
takes art that was at one time considered scandalous and gives readers the
opportunity to analyze them seriously, Meyer said. "When there are moments of public censorship the artist experiences
a lot of press coverage and visibility, but under the sign of scandal,"
he continued. "The work is battled over by various groups and any attention
to the artwork itself is lost." Meyer, who spent a total of 10 years working on "Outlaw Representation,"
said the book wasn't published without conflict. Oxford University Press asked to remove certain images from the book, Meyer
said. He refused to remove any of the artwork and, consequently, the book
was only published in the United States. Meyer said he felt that if he removed images the book would become incomplete. "I'm glad I didn't back down," he said. "I hated the idea
that a book about censorship was going to be censored." While attending graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley,
a large controversy arose involving the censorship of Robert Mapplethorpe's
art. In 1989 the Corcoran gallery of art canceled an exhibit of Mapplethorpe's
called "The Perfect Moment" two weeks before it was supposed to
open. "For me, this was the moment I lived through where I decided I wanted
to be able to contribute to the explanation of why these works are important,"
he said. "I really wanted to use my training as an art historian to tell
a story which hadn't been told."
Click here to return to top of page. Wilbur H. Siebert: A Memorial Marker to Commemorate His Research on the Underground Railroad(posted 9-23-03) HE was considered the world's foremost authority about the historic Underground
Railroad. On Tuesday, the late Wilbur H. Siebert, grandfather of a St. Clairsville
area businessman, will be honored with the dedication of a historical marker
at The Ohio State University. At the age of 80 in 1951, Professor Siebert wrote his final book, "The
Mysteries of Ohio's Underground Railroads." Siebert is being recognized by Ohio State's Department of History, and The
Ohio Historical Society as part of the Ohio Bicentennial Commission's celebration
of Ohio's statehood. John S. Marshall, longtime resident of St. Clairsville and grandson of Professor
Siebert, will attend Tuesday's dedication ceremony. Marshall has maintained an impressive number of significant artifacts and
memoirs of his grandfather's works. Siebert is recognized for organizing one of the most extensive historical
collections on the Underground Railroad in the United States. "When Professor
Siebert began teaching history at Ohio State in 1891, there was precious little
published information on the subject," noted Peter Hahn, OSU professor
of history and vice chair of the department. "It's fitting to memorialize
his contributions to Ohio history and Ohio's Bicentennial with this marker."
Click here to return to top of page. Roy Foster: Irish Revisionist (posted 9-22-03)
Andrew Brown, writing in the Guardian (Sept. 13, 2003): Elongated, stooped and rather handsome, like the decoration in an illuminated
manuscript, Roy Foster stands against the gold-washed wall of his house in
Kentish Town, north London. He cuts a strange, somewhat 90s figure, but it's
not clear from which century. Is he from the 1890s, when modern Irish nationalism
was conceived in the occult imagination of WB Yeats? Or the 1990s, when hatreds
that had seemed to define Irish history throughout the 20th century seemed
at last to lose some of their power? Most of that decade he spent on the second
volume of an authorised biography of Yeats, which is also a history of the
birth of modern Ireland and its myths about itself. It is an astonishing blend
of scholarship and sympathy, which brings together all his preoccupations
with Irish history, the English language and the role played in human affairs
by dreams and desires that never came true. His Modern Ireland has become the standard history of the period from about
1600 onwards, in which Irish history was dominated by the fact that a largely
Catholic country was being governed by a constitutionally Protestant one.
The first volume of his Yeats biography was praised to the skies: "Absolutely
marvellous," says Conor Cruise O'Brien, who also calls Foster "a
very brilliant, insightful historian." But Modern Ireland was significant not just as a history. Its publication,
and its success, marked important parts of the process whereby modern Ireland
came to terms with one of its own founding myths: that the essence of Ireland
was forged in 700 years of oppression by the Saxon invader. Foster was one of the generation of Irish historians who came to maturity
as the price of sectarian rhetoric became apparent in the bloody shambles
of Northern Ireland. Their work became known as "revisionism"and
was mocked by their enemies. But it was deadly serious, because it dealt with
the history and nature of Irish identity. When a war was being fought in the
north and people were being blown up to decide whether Protestants could be
properly Irish the question of whether Protestants had in the past been properly
Irish was not a purely academic one. Nor was the related question of whether
Irish history was the story of Irish nationalism. Foster is in no doubt that
it was not. "The Irish nationalist myth was energising and in many ways necessary
for a couple of generations after indepen dence and the necessary reappraisals
in the last generations haven't taken away from that," he says now. "I
remember very distinctly in 1966, when I was 17, the commemoration of the
Easter Rising. We went up to Dublin and were rather excited to see that Eamon
de Valera was still there." The president was, after all, a figure from
the myth himself, who had been condemned by the British to be shot after the
rising. "All this," Foster says now, "was pre- the balloon going up
in the north and pre- the rebirth of the IRA. The change in perception, after
all these old issues which used the old rhetoric flared into life was very
marked." What made the revisionism possible, he says, was the very success
of the nationalist project in producing a state where the old questions had
seemed quite safely mythological. The south was "a country that over
70 years has developed a stable, mature, and increasingly confident polity
while manipulating multiple forms of ambiguity in terms of national identity
and political ethos - opposite parties standing for the same things, a 'first
national language' spoken by next to nobody as their first national language,
a claim on territory that few politicians really wanted, and a booming economy
dependent on international handouts." There was, however, one area of Irish life where this picture of history
was not accepted, and that was among professional historians. From about 1940
onwards, at both the historically Catholic University College Dublin, and
the historically Protestant Trinity College, the study of history was dominated
by men who rejected the nationalist myth. They did not write large books,
and their work was largely unknown to the general public. But they taught
generations of teachers that Irish history was far more complicated than could
be publicly acknowledged. The writer Colm Tóibín came up to
University College Dublin in 1972 from a very hard-line republican background,
which incarnated the tradition of violent republicanism. His grandfather had
fought in 1916. He was shocked to discover that "my teachers didn't want
to know anything about physical force republicanism. They talked about O'Connell
and Parnell instead. This was in 1972, when a car-bomb campaign was being
waged in the north and was being justified, not just in the name of what the
other side had done last week, but also in the name of what Pearse and Connolly
had died for in 1916." The term "revisionist" first became a term of abuse in Irish historiography
in the late 1970s. Ruth Dudley Edwards, whose father Owen had been one of
the 40s generation of historians at University College, published a biography
of Patrick Pearse in 1978. She was accused of being a revisionist: "I
didn't know the word. But there was a perception that we were part of a political
movement." ...The quick book to make some money was Modern Ireland, and
proved to be the channel through which all the pent-up scepticism of four
decades of revisionism could burst into Irish public life. "Nobody else
had the grasp, the energy, the style, in a sense, to get at all that graduate
work and synthesise it," says Tóibín. "It really forced
itself into the Irish home. People who would have bought Tim Pat Coogan bought
this instead. When you went to look anything up in in it, you got the facts,
but you came away scratching your head, and refusing a grand narrative."
The distinctive quality of Modern Ireland among best-selling histories lies
in the way it answers almost every question by suggesting all the answers
are incomplete, and there is more to learn on almost every subject. The writer
Selina Hastings met him when he was busy with it. She asked what he was doing
- she was working on a biography of Nancy Mitford at the time - and when he
answered "Irish history", her heart sank and it showed. "Don't
worry," he said. "I'm doing it all about food and the private lives
of curates." Nothing could be more destructive of the simple certainties of the old story.
The narrative swings along easily enough, but the narrative is steeped in
the rational, careful, sceptical temper of Foster's mind. He wrote of FSL
Lyons, a historian he greatly admired, that "his intelligence was notably
subtle, reflective, interrogative" and these, say his admirers, are the
qualities displayed in his own work. Irish history is full enough of atrocity
but Foster reacts with irony where others might fizzle with indignation. It all flickers playfully as summer lightning, until it strikes and scorches.
In a recent paper on the role of hatred in Irish history, he writes: "Historical
study of the IRA has now shown a rather different view of the strategy behind
the 1981 hunger strikes than Padraig O'Malley's sensitive but over-literary
analysis. As one of the prisoners put it, 'We felt that the IRA should have
been slaughtering people in 20s and 30s' outside the prisons, to counterpoint
the individual deaths in the Maze. This is an instructive contrast to O'Malley's
reading of the tactic as 'the ancient tradition of the heroic quest, embedded
in the hidden recesses of the Celtic consciousness'." But even here, the Fosterish touch is to praise as "sensitive"
the author he's about to disembowel. "Foster always uses the stiletto,"
says Edwards, "Whereas Conor Cruise O'Brien will use anything - even
a mortar." Tóibín points out that Foster has not aligned
himself against the Hume-Adams agreement that brought Sinn Fein into politics
in Northern Ireland in the way the other most notable revisionists have done.
Click here to return to top of page. Pipes and Kramer: Anti-Arab and Anti-Muslim, Says Joel Benin (posted 9-18-03)
Joel Benin, writing in Mondediplo.com (July 2003): Shortly after 11 September 2001 Martin Kramer, former director of the Dayan
Centre for Middle East Studies at Tel Aviv University, published a tract condemning
the entire academic field of Middle East studies in North America (1). Kramer alleges that the "mandarins" of the Middle East Studies
Association of North America have imposed an intellectual and political orthodoxy
inspired by Edward Said's Orientalism (2); moreover they failed to predict
the attacks or warn the US public about the dangers of radical Islam. Kramer
has not seen fit to criticise the FBI and the CIA, who are specifically charged
with conducting intelligence and preventing crime. Kramer also edits Middle East Quarterly, the house organ of the Middle East
Forum, a neo-conservative thinktank directed by Daniel Pipes. Pipes has a
long record of attempting to incite Americans against Arabs and Muslims. In
1990 he wrote: "Western European societies are unprepared for the massive
immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining
different standards of hygiene . . . All immigrants bring exotic customs and
attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most"(3). One recent project of the Middle East Forum is Campus-Watch, a website designed
to police dissent on university campuses. Its aim was to "monitor and
gather information on professors who fan the flames of disinformation, incitement,
and ignorance". Campus-Watch (which has now been removed from the web due to criticism of
its McCarthyite character) claimed that Middle East scholars "seem generally
to dislike their own country and think even less of American allies abroad".
The reason was that "Middle East studies in the US have become the preserve
of Middle Eastern Arabs, who have brought their views with them". President Bush recently nominated Pipes for a seat on the board of directors
of the US Institute for Peace, a congressionally funded foundation established
in 1984 "to promote the prevention, management, and peaceful resolution
of international conflicts".
Click here to return to top of page. John Esposito: American Dissenter (posted 9-18-03)
Omayma Abdel-Latif, writing in A HREF="http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2003/645/intrvw.htm">Al-Ahram< (July 3-9, 2003): John Esposito acknowledges the fact that in the US he is "a controversial
figure". One of America's foremost authorities and interpreters of Islam,
as the Wall Street Journal once described him, Esposito is also considered
to be one of the few voices of dissent within American academia. His opponents
charge that he is an "apologist for Islam and soft on Muslims" and
that he and his colleagues have misinformed the US administration about the
true dangers of Islamist groups, contending that they underestimated the so-called
Islamic threat. Esposito dismisses such charges as "ideologically-inspired". He
defines himself as simply "a scholar of Islam". For him it is almost
an article of faith that there is a war being fought by some ideologues to
win "the hearts and minds" of the American people. "In the
old days, being controversial was fine because we had a more open society.
Now we don't, so we get nailed," said 63- year-old Esposito in an interview
with Al-Ahram Weekly during a brief stop in Cairo last week. Over the past three decades, and long before the "green menace"
replaced the red one, Esposito has been carving a niche for himself as an
authority on matters Islamic. He is founding director of the reputable Centre
for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown University, a centre established
in 1993 to address the issue of dialogue between Islam and the West. Esposito,
once chair of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESNA),
has written numerous articles, books and essays about Muslim politics, beliefs
and cultures. His books are usually described as jargon-free and provide "a
lucid introduction to truths on Islam which must become common knowledge",
as Karen Armstrong, the famous theologian once said of his latest book Unholy
War: Terror in the Name of Islam.
Click here to return to top of page. Niall Ferguson: Now a Star (posted 9-17-03)
Cate Devine, writing in the Glasgow Herald (Sept. 15, 2003): Niall Ferguson is in jaunty mood. "Right, chaps, what's the order of
battle?" he says as he is ushered into the reception hallway of his alma
mater, Glasgow Academy, to shake hands vigorously with two old masters (Latin
and English). He is undaunted by the experience. In fact, he looks distinctly
relieved to have left behind him the bohemian Great Western Road. The clubby
welcome of the old boys, into which war metaphors are the accepted passwords,
is much more his thing. Professor Ferguson was a star pupil in the mid-1970s when the fully independent
school, one of the top in Scotland, was still boys-only. Ferguson, the handsome (some say) 39-year-old Glaswegian who won over a whole
new generation of TV viewers to history with his controversial Channel 4 series
about the British Empire, and who was recently poached from Oxford University
by New York University, was in Glasgow to deliver the Dallachy lecture to
some 300 guests of the academy. He is now the darling of the American right,
and was voted most popular professor by his high-flying US students within
a matter of days. You can see why. His humour is distinctly establishment.
He jokes: "I feel queasy when I come back to school, and even queasier
when I think of Latin. My son has just started learning it and he keeps asking
me the words for things like tongue." He smiles as the others clock the
significance of what he's just said. "Really? Which school?" they
murmur, and another exclusive conversation begins. I'm in the group, but not part of it. Actually, Ferguson doesn't address
me once during this little male bonding exercise. It's only when we sit down
in his old Latin classroom that he speaks directly to me, and that's only
because he has to. Why is he so evasive? "Because I know what you're going to say about
me," he responds immediately. And what would that be? "That I'm
a right-wing unionist Thatcherite." Surely he doesn't think I have an
agenda? This undoubtedly brilliant man knows a bit about journalism, but obviously
not that much. He's married to Sue Douglas, the former Scotsman executive editor, ex-editor
of the Sunday Express, friend of Andrew Neil, and currently an executive with
Conde Nast. On his way up, Ferguson himself wrote freelance columns for the
Daily Telegraph and the Daily Mail - though under the pseudonyms of Alec Campbell
and Campbell Ferguson so as not to upset his impoverished colleagues in British
academia. He now has a (pounds) 1.3m three-book contract and enjoys a superstar
lifestyle, dividing his time between his bachelor pad in Manhattan and the
family home in rural Oxfordshire, where Mrs F prefers to reside with their
three children - Felix, nine, Freya, eight, and Lachlan, three. They will
not, he tells me later, be educated in Scotland. He looks at his exam register from 1976, tuts, and shakes his head. "I
failed at the final hurdle. I only got a B in maths. There's simply no excuse
for that." What exactly is wrong with getting a B in A-level maths? "I
got As in everything else - history, English, and Latin. Being weak in maths
is my one big intellectual regret because, along with English, it is the other
global language." He also believes firmly that everyone should learn Latin. Does it worry him
that most state comprehensives no longer teach it? "Oh, don't they?"
he says. "Well, it seems to me that if you are interested in history,
it's important to understand the kind of people who waged the First and Second
World Wars. These were the officer classes and they were drilled in the classics.
Latin is an elite education, and learning it helps us understand Britain's
role in the world. The Roman empire has undoubtedly cast her shadow on our
mindset. "People say that America is the new Rome, but they don't know what that
means. They don't really understand what Roman civilisation was." Ferguson's next book, and his lecture at Glasgow Academy, is about the American
empire. He believes America is as imperial as Rome and Britain were in their
heyday, but that it lacks self -awareness. "It is an empire in denial,"
he says, "and an empire that doesn't recognise its own power is a dangerous
one.
Click here to return to top of page. Why Is John Lott Receiving Better Treatment than Michael Bellesiles? (posted 9-12-03)
Dick Dahl, writing for joingtogether.org (Sept. 11, 2003): Early this year, it looked as though researcher John R. Lott, Jr.'s days
as an influential voice on domestic gun policy in the U.S. were over. Lott,
widely touted by pro-gun activists since the publication of his book, "More
Guns, Less Crime," in 1998, found himself under attack for his inability
to provide evidence to support some of his claims about the effectiveness
of guns for self-defense. Most significantly, when asked to provide details of a survey that supposedly
proved that 98 percent of gun defenses involved the mere brandishing of the
weapon, Lott said that his computer crashed. And despite his claim that the
survey was large and national, he could produce neither any records of it
nor names of anyone who knew anything about it. Then, to top off Lott's apparent
disgrace, a resourceful Weblogger named Julian Sanchez conducted research
to show that Lott had created a fake persona named Mary Rosh for the purpose
of providing rave reviews of John Lott's work. Much of the media response to these developments was predictable. Only one
year earlier, Emory University historian Michael Bellesiles had resigned from
his job under fierce pressure from pro-gun advocates over his own inability
to substantiate a claim in his book, "Arming America," published
in 2000. In it, Bellesiles wrote that levels of gun ownership in early America
were not as high as is generally believed. It was an argument that calls into
question the gun lobby's assertion that firearms have always been an intrinsic
part of American culture, but when he said that he could not produce notes
to prove a section about the paucity of guns in early probate records because
he'd lost the notes in an office flood, the National Rifle Association went
on the attack. The effort was successful and Bellesiles resigned. So when Lott's various credibility problems emerged earlier this year, the
press called him the pro-gunners' Bellesiles. Understandable though the comparison
may be, however, the media portrayal of the two men as equals within the two
opposing ideological camps is misleading. Where Bellesiles' contribution to
the overall gun-control argument was primarily interesting on a historical
level, Lott's work is critically important to the pro-gun side. The pro-gun
argument for minimal or no restrictions on gun ownership essentially rests
on two claims: (1) The Constitution ensures individual rights to guns, as
opposed to the milit
Humdrum work, but Weinberg was alert to a remote yet exciting possibility.
In a memoir, one of Hitler's secretaries had mentioned a "secret"
book about Nazi foreign policy - Weinberg's special subject. Then, when Hitler's
Table Talk was published by Hugh Trevor-Roper (later Lord Dacre) in 1953,
there was a reference to this "unpublished work" by Hitler himself.
Weinberg hoped to track it down one day, though it was not easy to know where
to look.
Siebert, a professor of history at OSU from 1893 to 1935, published dozens
of books and other articles on the Underground Railroad in Ohio and elsewhere.
"History is not about manifest destinies, but unexpected and unforeseen
futures," he has written. "The most illuminating history is often
written to show how people acted in the expectation of a future that never
happened." This remark points to the difficulty of the task he has set
himself as a historian: anyone can ascertain the things that actually happened.
What's hard is the sympathetic reconstruction of the things that never happened,
but which are needed to make sense of the things that did.
LEADING the charge against critical thinking about Islam and the Middle East
in the US are Martin Kramer, Daniel Pipes, and Steven Emerson. Exploiting
legitimate fears since 11 September 2001, their writings and speeches seek
to impose an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim orthodoxy on Americans.